Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. The more significant the loss, the more intense the grief will be. You may associate grief with the death of a loved one—which is often the cause of the most intense type of grief—but any loss can cause grief.

The death of someone close to us is one of life’s most stressful events. We fear loss of companionship and the changes it will bring to our lives. It takes time to heal and each of us responds differently.

When a loved one dies, it can be difficult to know how to help kids cope with the loss, particularly as you work through your own grief. How much kids can understand about death depends largely on their age, life experiences, and personality. But there are a few important points to remember in all cases.

How Can I Help My Child Cope with a Friend’s Death?

How children can survive the death of a loved one. Various resources and articles.

In our bereavement, we spend different lengths of time working through each step and express each stage with different levels of intensity. The five stages do not necessarily occur in any specific order. We often move between stages before achieving a more peaceful acceptance of death. Many of us are not afforded the luxury of time required to achieve this final stage of grief.

Worden suggests that there are four tasks one must accomplish for “the process of mourning to be completed” and “equilibrium to be reestablished”. He makes clear these are in no particular order, though there is some natural order in that completion of some tasks presuppose completion of another task. He acknowledges that people may need to revisit certain tasks over time, that grief is not linear, and that it is difficult to determine a timeline for completing the grief tasks.